The World's Top 12 Fastest Vehicles

In 1911, the fastest aircraft could travel approximately 90 mph and the fastest cars could do a little more than 100 mph. One hundred years later, these numbers seem small compared to space shuttles that travel over 17,000 mph and rocket-powered cars that can break the sound barrier. Here is a look at the fastest vehicles people have engineered since–in space, in the air, on the ground and on water.

Helios Probe

Helios Probe

Fastest in Space – Unmanned

Top Speed: 153,800 mph

To escape Earth's gravitational pull, an object must be traveling around 25,000 mph. Accordingly, planetary probes are the fastest objects humankind has engineered. In 1976, the Helios 2 orbiter became the fastest manmade object, traveling twice the speed of Earth's orbit around the sun. The orbiter's speed was caused not by its own thrust but by an eccentric orbit caused by the mass of the sun. In its closest approach, the orbiter was 26 million miles away from the star–10 million miles closer than the planet Mercury. At its top speed, the Helios 2 was traveling 42.7 miles every second.

Galileo Probe

Galileo Probe

Fastest in Space – Unmanned

Top Speed: 107,000 mph

In 2003, the Galileo mission to study Jupiter and its moons had already been extended several years and the space probe was running out of propellant. Probes to distant planets use nuclear thermal generators, which keep them operational for decades, but eventually wear out, says Roger Launius, an expert on U.S. spaceflight. "Those are good for 30, 40 maybe 50 years, but they have a half-life," he says. "Over the course of a lengthy mission, you find you have less and less power to supply whatever systems are onboard." Instead of risking a crash into Europa, Jupiter's ice-covered moon, the Galileo probe took a controlled dive into the gas giant. Jupiter has a gravitational pull that is 2.5 times the gravitational pull of Earth, and as Galileo entered its atmosphere, it accelerated to a speed of 107,000 mph. At that speed, a trip from the Earth to the Moon would take 2.2 hours.